Possible explanation for the occasional long map loading delay on garmin nuvi's!

I have not had any issues with slow loading of maps, but my mate who has a 760 has had endless problems with his. His first unit totally failed within a week of purchase and his second one sometimes takes ages to laod map data. So this is the explanation ... makes sense ... somewhat.

Hopefully Garmin isn't purposely trying to destroy our units. There is no benefit to defragging a flash drive. In fact, defragging is bad for a flash drive.

Here's just one article I quickly pulled up
http://ask-leo.com/should_i_defragment_my_usb_flash_drive.ht...

There are tons of articles on this topic. Just google "defrag flash drive" or "defrag solid state drive"

Link to screen grab of my 760's defrag info screen page taken today:

http://home.comcast.net/~rjrsw2005/327.bmp

"To check if a DEFRAG has occurred after one of these instances, go to the trip computer screen and press the round speedometer dial for approx 7-10 seconds."

If your unit is defragmenting often, then it's possible you have very little free space in the flash, forcing smaller chunks of flash to be used, requiring fragmented writes. Try reducing how much extra stuff you have loaded (MP3s, etc) and see if it happens less often.

Have you checked your's to see how many times it has run the defrag?

No, I have over a half gig free so plenty of room. When discounting for the map file itself I've used less than 50% of the available space for the balance of the data files.

The defrag would give the unit a slight pickup in read speed if the files it uses start to become to fragmented. The unit rewrites files every time you turn the unit on and off so the files would become fragmented fairly quickly no matter how full the memory is.

Why would the unit be doing a defrag? There is no reason for defragging on solid state memory devices.

Defragging is useful ONLY on spinning hard drive platters where you have to actually move the little read/write arms around to get the next chunk of data and having the chunks all in a nice little line on the platter speeds things up by not having to make the little R/W arm move about.

With solid state, nothing is moving. You can access any location at the same speed as any other location. So defragging a solid state storage device not only does nothing beneficial, it can actually shorten the life of the storage due to writing to the same locations too many times unnecessarily.

PT

I'm the originator of the post made at GPS Review (AKA SergZak). I agree with the other posters here regarding defragging a solid state device, however Garmin is apparently doing it for some reason. Whether or not the defrag cycle is actually causing the long "loading maps" issue has yet to be seen. That's why I made the post in the first place...to get the word out to more individuals to keep an eye on the defrag date. If it coincides more than not with a long "loading maps" time, it would seem to point to that being the cause...still, nothing is verified and this could just be a simple coincidence.

That's a question Garmin would have to answer. It is obvious they have some sort of trigger that is causing the defrag to run on it's own. It is something that is being tracked by the unit because the number of times and the last date is displayed in the hidden diagnostic screens. They must have discovered some benefit from it or why even bother.

Actual screen grab of diagnostic screen of my 760:
http://home.comcast.net/~rjrsw2005/327.bmp

Ah, sorry about that. I didn't realize it was a built in function of the 760. My brain read it as people were defragging their GPSs. Like they were plugging them into their computer then using the Windows defrag tool on the GPS when mounted as a mass storage device.

So ignore me and carry on!

Still not sure what Garmin things they are doing though.

PT

bump